We came here once. It snowed and you wanted to see as much as possible. It was freezing and exhausting and I just wanted to be still, but I didn’t know how to say no. We took photos by the canal: a passing tourist captured our frozen smiles as we posed on that ancient bridge, and then you took another of just me hands plunged into pockets, before I played my turn as photographer. It was your suggestion to have photos of us alone, to spare any future awkwardness in case things didn’t work out.

However, you didn’t count on the magic of iphoto and every image from every trip of the last decade, is here with me now. I kept them all because even deleting those with you in them would not delete you. Or the memory of you. Or the fact that we had a slightly miserable weekend in a medieval city, once.

That bridge is bathed in sunshine now, on this unseasonably warm early Autumn day. People are milling about waiting for the canal tour and there is no order to this most un-English of queues creating good-natured jostling in the alley to get through to the square. I sit outside the cafe opposite, with just my espresso and kletskoppen for company.

I almost laugh at the cliche of me as ‘traveller with notebook’.

This is the Europe I conjured for myself in my bedroom aged 15. I imagined travelling for months on end, stopping only to trample-grapes-pick-fruit-pour-pints: enough for the train to the next destination. I would make life-long friends and have torrid affairs with artistic types. I love my 15 year old self for imagining such adventures.

I wish I could stay here longer and remember and dream, but there is a taxi and my beloved, waiting.

The waiter takes my money and empty cup. I am grateful I took a photo, so I know that it happened.

*on the tube to St Pancras I finished Julian Barnes’ latest title. About memory and its vicissitudes; it hung around me a little, as the best books do.

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